Roadtrip Recap {Yellowstone}

This summer our family moved from Nebraska to Idaho. It didn't take much to realize that we would be silly to NOT stop at Yellowstone!

We started out on June 1st and only travelled as far as Ogallala due to a late start doing a walk-thru of our Nebraska rental with our landlady.

The next day we traveled north through Nebraska and stopped at Scotts Bluff National Monument.

We ate lunch, took a short walk and a few pictures, then got our National Parks Passport stamped before continuing on to Thermopiles, Wyoming.

Day three brought us through more beautiful Wyoming country and Yellowstone!

This is our second time at Yellowstone in three years. You can see pictures from our last visit here and here. Both times we've stuck to the main road and made stops to take short walks and see the big attractions. We have plans when the boys are a little older (and now that we live closer) to go back for at least a week with a trailer or tent and see the back country.

We saw herds of bison and elk and a scraggly wild sheep. We walked to a waterfall and had our picture taken with a moose. :)

We stayed in West Yellowstone, MT, where there was plenty of posing with the wildlife (statues) and headed back to the valley for Day 2.

We took a walking tour of a plethora of geysers. It was stinky and hot! We enjoyed the colorful pools and were startled by one geyser erupting right as we passed by!

We ate a picnic lunch by a river and completed our driving tour of Yellowstone. We exited at the North gate and drove to Billings, MT, that night.

Montana is beautiful! We had a hard time finding a motel that night for some reason, but made sure the boys got to swim for an hour before bed. They love swimming! We knew sleeping in motels for a week and driving all day--even with stops to take walks and see wildlife in Yellowstone--was hard on our kiddos and made sure they got that evening swim every chance we could!

As we traveled through the rest of Western Montana and into Idaho, the scenery just kept getting prettier! We kept wondering if this was really true, that we were MOVING to this beautiful area and wouldn't have to leave in a few days. And in the time since (it's been two months) we still feel the same way! We're blessed to live in an incredibly beautiful part of the country.

Just to fill in the gap, we didn't have housing lined up for our first few nights in Idaho. We thought we might be waiting up to 6 weeks for our rental and we were tired of motels! Thankfully a church member volunteered their trailer for us for as long as we needed it. They even pulled it to a place where we could stay for free and have running water and a full bathroom to use. As it turned out our rental was available in just five days! Read more about the rental here.

Have you been on any road trips lately?